Forsta Messaging Bot

Secure autonomous message receipt, processing, storage, and/or transmission on the Forsta messaging platform.

About

This repository is a (skeleton) Node.js-based Forsta end-to-end-encrypted messaging client. It allows for autonomous receipt, processing, storage, and/or transmission of messaging data to perform some useful task. Please fork it or one of our several projects based off of it!

A Forsta messaging bot can be set up to receive messages sent to a particular user, or (if you are an organization administrator) it can be set up as a special organization "monitor" which will receive copies of all messaging traffic to, from, or among users in your organization.

The Why — Decentralized Data Security

What is important to Forsta is that your messaging data is only accessible to messaging clients that you are in control of, whether the client is an app running on the phone in your pocket, or a bot that is running on a server in your datacenter or the compute cloud of your choice.

Some organizations need to be able perform forensic e-discovery on past messages. Others may need to be able to automatically monitor for transmission of sensitive information. Or maybe they want something to automatically deliver sensitive information, or answer help-desk questions and handle after-hours inquires. Or individual users might want to be able to securely access their own message histories after buying a new phone and reinstalling their messaging client.

There are countless needs like these, and typically they are satisfied using centrally-managed infrastructure that can receive, store, process, and respond to messages as needed. Even systems that have pluggable architectures to facilitate outside development of these sorts of capabilities usually rely on a centralized approach. Unfortunately, the centralized approach provides a tempting, centralized target for outside attackers -- and it also requires users to trust that insiders won't abuse their access to all messages. Forsta is different.

Forsta does not offer anything that depends on centralized receipt, storage, or processing of users’ messaging data. Instead, Forsta makes it trivial for others to run messaging “bots” to perform these functions. These bots are just another kind of messaging client, like the messaging clients running in users’ browsers and on their phones. And just like the other messaging clients, Forsta bots send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages to do their work while running in a context controlled by the user.

Quick Start

These deployment buttons can be used to validate that this messaging bot will meet your organizations needs with as little setup pain as possible.

Install Requirements

Node.js 8 (or newer)
Ruby
- sass (gem install sass)

Developer Install

If you want to build upon the Forsta Messaging Bot you can install and run directly from the source code.

git clone https://github.com/ForstaLabs/forsta-messaging-bot.git
cd messaging-bot
make run

Usage

Once running, the default port and listening address are 0.0.0.0:4096. If you are running locally you can access the web interface by opening http://localhost:4096.

You can change the listening address by setting LISTEN_ADDR to a valid host address for your server, E.g. something like localhost or 127.0.0.1 to only accept local connections.

The default listening port can be changed by setting PORT to any valid numeric port, e.g. 8000.

Storage is managed through Forsta librelay which currently supports local filesystem and Redis. For more information about setting up custom storage see: https://github.com/ForstaLabs/librelay-node#storage.

License

Licensed under the GPLv3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html